By Adam Pagnucco.
Last month, I wrote that the school board candidates had no money.
Well guess what? Now that the second and last pre-primary campaign finance reports are in, the school board candidates still don’t have money.
OK, that might be a slight exaggeration. But when you compare the receipts of these candidates to the size of a presidential year electorate, it’s like walking into a jewelry store with pennies in the pocket.
Now to the data. The table below shows receipts and expenditures for all school board candidates in this cycle through April 26. Burn rate is expenditures divided by receipts and is a measure of how fast the candidates are spending their money. (Note: Jonathan Long has filed affidavits instead of reports, meaning that he has raised and spent less than $1,000.)
How bad is this? In the 2020 primary, 217,794 people voted in the at-large school board race. If a similar turnout occurs this year, the average school board candidate would have raised four cents per voter in receipts.
In other words, after a half hour of wandering around the jewelry store, they would be asked to leave.
A few notes.
SEIU Local 500 not only endorsed all three incumbents (Lynne Harris – At-Large, Rebecca Smondrowski – District 2 and Shebra Evans – District 4), the union also gave each of them a $6,000 PAC check. Those checks account for 54% of Harris’s total receipts, 71% of Evans’s total receipts and 92% of Smondrowski’s total receipts for the cycle. And still all three of them (along with everyone else) are broke.
Bethany Mandel accepted $1,000 from Presidential Coalition, LLC, a conservative group and IRS 527 organization founded by David Bossie. Bossie is the long-time president of Citizens United, which won a famous case at the U.S. Supreme Court opening up massive corporate spending in federal elections. Bossie also worked for Donald Trump’s campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020. In 2019, Axios reported that the Presidential Coalition used Bossie’s association with Trump to raise millions of dollars which were then primarily used to pay for administrative costs, including Bossie’s salary, rather than political activities. This provoked a brief rift with Trump which was patched up after the 2020 general election, when Trump recruited Bossie to help him challenge the election results.
Laura Stewart’s contributors include long-time Democratic power broker Terry Lierman ($500), County Executive Marc Elrich’s right hand Debbie Spielberg ($90), former school board member Jill Ortman-Fouse ($100) and Democratic Socialist Max Socol ($500), who ran and lost to District 18 State Senator Jeff Waldstreicher two years ago.
The cost of Rita Montoya’s mailer vowing to take action on antisemitism is not included in these reports. We won’t know it until the next report is due on August 27.
The above may sound like I’m criticizing the candidates for not raising money. I’m not. I’m really criticizing the county’s donor community, which is large, influential and gives millions of dollars every cycle to candidates all over the country. If you’re a frequent donor to candidates and you have some opinions about MCPS – positive or negative – you should absolutely pick school board candidates you agree with and give them money. If you don’t, how do you expect progress in the schools?
So get out there, research these candidates (I write about the school board a lot), help them out and vote! Primary election day is May 14.